


When I was a Child, I was Lost in the Wild

by dramaticbanjo



Category: Inazuma Eleven GO
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-25
Updated: 2015-05-25
Packaged: 2018-04-01 06:38:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 847
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4009666
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dramaticbanjo/pseuds/dramaticbanjo





	When I was a Child, I was Lost in the Wild

Kusaka was used to not fitting in.  
Even in the Inazuma Japan Team, which was about as mismatched as one could get for a soccer team, it was hard to feel at ease around people who had won awards and were some of the best in Japan for their original sport. All Kusaka could boast for was that he once ended a gang fight by punching the other boy in the face hard enough he broke his nose in one shot. 

But if he was being honest with himself, which wasn’t often, it went further than him being a feared delinquent and most of them being accomplished athletes—after all, having no mother and a pathetic washed up drunk of a dad kind of made it had to fit in.  
There, he managed to admit it to himself, and he wasn’t able to do that often, despite living with it for almost all of his life.   
But that probably explained a lot about him; if he concentrated hard enough he could probably imitate Minaho rattling off about how his mother leaving his dad gave him ‘abandonment issues’ and his dad’s drinking problems and lack of presence gave him ‘problems with authority’ or something, and how it all gave him his anger issues because of yadda yadda, Kusaka Ryuuji has daddy and mommy and girl and authority and general anger issues.

Maybe Minaho wouldn’t say it exactly like that. 

Now he was getting angry about it, and he was just thinking about it when he couldn’t sleep.   
Kusaka took a deep breath, staring up at the ceiling of the rooms they had been provided with, which was very different from his room at his old apartment that he shared with his dad; for one thing, the air conditioning worked.   
With a long sigh, he pulled himself up into a sitting position, reasoning that he wasn’t going to get much more sleep if he could practically feel his anger rolling in his mind like some sort of large animal. Getting out of bed, he had enough mind to pull on a wrinkled t-shirt from the floor so he wasn’t wandering around the place at god-knows-what in the morning in only his pajama pants. 

With a yawn, he opened his door, and it slid open almost silently, sliding shut when he left and started walking down the hallway in the general direction of the kitchen and cafeteria area. He was mid yawn when the door to the cafeteria area opened, and he almost didn’t register there being another person there until he was halfway to the fridge. Like how most of their encounters went, both Kusaka and Konoha froze and stared at each other with varying degrees of an embarrassed blush working its way up their faces.   
After a moment of silence, Kusaka manage to speak, “Oh, uh, hi. I didn’t think anyone else was up.”   
When he always made the count of the team and how he didn’t fit in, he always managed to forget her—he didn’t mean to, after all, she was a perfectly nice girl, even though she was so meek and quiet he probably could count on one hand the amount of conversations they’ve had since they met. 

For her part, Morimura was crouched by the large window, leaning against the glass with a cup of something in her hands.   
As usual, she didn’t look him in the eye and mumbled softly about how she couldn’t sleep and though getting something to drink would help her. After that, it kind of trailed off into an uncomfortable silence, and Kusaka headed to the fridge behind the counter, both for something to do, and because her idea actually sounded pretty good.   
While he was rummaging around, Morimura sighed quietly, so quietly, it could’ve been mistaken for a breath of air. 

To say Kusaka intimidated Morimura was an understatement, and quite an impressive one, since everything intimidated her.   
But Kusaka was taller than everyone else on the team, even taller than Ibuki, with bad rumors around him like a flag. From what she had seen of his infamous temper at the Teikoku exhibition match, when she wasn’t trying to hide her face in her hands, he was exactly the type of persons she needed to run in the opposite direction of.   
If she was going to be honest with herself, which she often was and overly so, he reminded her of some sort of caged animal—the cage could be his disarming smile, and the wild animal could be the delinquent who threw whole gangs into the hospital for looking at him wrong.   
She kept glancing at him as he pulled a carton of milk out of the fridge and took a long drink from it without bothering to pour a glass, before curling further against her seat—yes, Kusaka Ryuuji was one of the people who scared her the most out of the team, even when he was wandering around at weird hours of the night in his pajamas and drinking straight out of the milk carton.


End file.
